In plain words: Two agents playing a picture-describing game invented their own signals, and the study checked whether those signals resembled human language. The signals solved the task almost perfectly but were not readable or built from reusable parts, until limits on how they could talk were added.
Abstract · Natural Language Does Not Emerge 'Naturally' in Multi-Agent Dialog
A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in the protocols developed by the agents, all learned without any human supervision! In this paper, using a Task and Tell reference game between two agents as a testbed, we present a sequence of 'negative' results culminating in a 'positive' one -- showing that while most agent-invented languages are effective (i.e. achieve near-perfect task rewards), they are decidedly not interpretable or compositional. In essence, we find that natural language does not emerge 'naturally', despite the semblance of ease of natural-language-emergence that one may gather from recent literature. We discuss how it is possible to coax the invented languages to become more and more human-like and compositional by increasing restrictions on how two agents may communicate.
Satwik Kottur, José M. F. Moura, Stefan Lee, Dhruv Batra
arXiv:1706.08502 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CV · submitted Jun 26, 2017 · updated Aug 20, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted at EMNLP 2017 as short paper